Researching Border Violence in an Indefensible Europe

ABSTRACT

Significant documentation generated by activists, researchers, and human rights organisations has evidenced how violence is systematically deployed by European states to regulate the mobility and settlement of people on the move arriving from the Global South. While documenting violations at Europe’s borders is necessary to challenge states’ efforts to obscure violence and to enable accountability for border injustices, this article offers a critical reflection of the assumptions and performative effects of such research. Drawing on critical border studies literature and the critique of ‘damage-centred’ research (Tuck and Yang, 2014) offered by decolonial and feminist theorists, the article reflects on how efforts to render border harms visible in a Europe where violence against people on the move is normalised – and widely endorsed – risk reproducing the dehumanisation it seeks to challenge. I examine two strands of critique: firstly, of how research describing violence may unintendedly reify dominant representations that suggest an unbridgeable difference between those whose bodies can be injured, and those untouched by violence. Secondly, I suggest that provided the inherent violence of Europe’s borders and the affective attachments of European societies to the unequal world order they sustain, exposing violence may not necessarily contribute to ending it. I conclude with a discussion on how research may be deployed to challenge these affective attachments to violence. The article thus contributes with a critical reflection on the role of knowledge production in variably reproducing and challenging the borders of a Europe that, as Césaire (1950) has proposed, is indefensible.

Introduction

It is by now well documented that European states, under the auspices of a more or less permanent ‘crisis’ of border control and refugee reception, use an expansive repertoire of violent measures to contain and prevent people arriving from the Global South to enter their territories to seek protection and better life opportunities, and to limit their access to rights, resources and freedoms as they arrive (Border Violence Monitoring Network 2020, De Genova 2013, Freedom of Movements Research Collective 2018, Isakjee et al. 2020, Landau 2019, Mayblin et al. 2019, Mountz 2020). As a result, people seeking protection are exposed to direct and indirect forms of violence, which render their lives continuously unsafe, and dispossess them of their present and future (Philipson Isaac, 2022). Borders thus continue to inflict harm long after the time of crossing (Khosravi 2019). Border crossers’ vulnerability to state-sanctioned, premature, border-related death (Gilmore 2007) is structured along the lines of race, gender, and class, although this discrimination is obscured by ostensibly ‘objective’ classifications of humans into categories of citizenship, origin, and labour market skills (Jung 2023, Mongia 1999). Yet, the violence at Europe’s borders demonstrates that violations are acceptable when racially coded – borders serve as constant reminders of the exceptions to Europe’s declared commitment to ‘liberal’ values of universal human rights, and equality before the law. The routine and systemic production of premature death at the borders of Europe has prompted recognition among scholars – some have argued it came remarkably late to migration and border studies, compared to other fields (Golash-Boza, Duenas, and Xiong 2019, Isakjee et al. 2020) – that the liberal promise of rights that European modernity has propagated is reserved for those belonging to the ‘zone of being’ (Fanon 1967), while violently excluding the ‘Non-Being Other’ (Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou 2015).

To challenge the racial violence that systematically occurs at Europe’s borders, activist movements, human rights organisations, and border and migration researchers have tirelessly worked to document harms, draw public attention to violations, and demand accountability from governments and authorities responsible for violations. These efforts have been motivated by the conviction that visibilisation is key to end violence. My own research on detention, deportation and state violence in Northern Europe has been motivated by similar assumptions. Yet, concerns have been raised both from (over)researched ‘victims’ of border violence, and from within academic circles, about the effects of these representations of violence, and about the ways in which the research may unintentionally participate in the violent bordering practices and racial worldviews it criticises (Andersson 2016, Cabot 2016, Cabot 2019, Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou 2015, Vanyoro et al. 2019). With the aim of contributing to this discussion, this article asks what academic knowledge production about border harms does; that is, how it intervenes, and what its performative effects are, in this moment when border crises and deaths have become a permanent and widely endorsed feature of contemporary European politics. The aim is not to call into question the importance of efforts by activists and researchers to challenge border harms, but to critically explore the role that visibilisation of violence through documentation plays – or does not play – in ending it.

This point deserves repeating: the purpose of critique here is not to make generalised judgements of whether research on border violence is ‘good or bad’, but ‘to bring into relief the very framework of evaluation itself’ (Butler 2001, 9th para, see also Foucault 1978). It entails asking what orderings of the world are reproduced and challenged in research that describes border violence, and how these documentation practices open for or foreclose ‘alternative possibilities of ordering’ (ibid.). Hence, and importantly, I am not arguing that researchers should stop documenting, rendering visible, and problematising border violence and its detrimental impacts on people on the move; nor do I aim to dictate what methods, ethical principles, or practices of reflexivity researchers should engage with when undertaking research on borders. Nor is it my aim to add to the literature on reflexivity, methodology and ethics in social scientific research; instead, I am interested in the (necessarily contradictory, and always ‘dirty’; see Smith 1999) role of knowledge production in struggles over and for emancipation and social justice (Grosfoguel 2012, Tuck and Yang, 2014). My point of departure is the assumptions about the role and function of research that I have found underpin much of the work on border violence, and my unease with them. I therefore found Stern and Baaz (2016) ‘methodology of unease’ a useful starting point for interrogating the role of research in violent contexts. ‘Unease’, the authors contend, may arise when research findings contradict the dominant or critical narratives that researchers subscribe to, or when questions of power, knowledge, and the embeddedness of research (and the researcher) into the violent arrangements they study come to the fore (see also Cabot 2016). This article takes their invitation to explore some of the uneasy challenges of (Europe-based and Eurocentric) border and migration studies in a time of intensified border violence.

While conceptual rather than empirical in nature, the argument presented here is informed by my previous research in various sites where border violence is enacted, including detention and deportation camps, migration offices and border police stations (Lindberg 2020, 2022). Most of my research has focused on the Nordic context, where discussions on border violence have remained relatively limited (but see Abdelhady, Gren, and Joormann 2020, Canning 2019, Khosravi 2009); partly because the more overt and spectacular forms of border violence to a large extent are outsourced to Europe’s Southern and Eastern geographies, and partly because dominant narratives within politics and research still insist on Nordic exceptionalism from colonialism and racial capitalism, a belief in the ‘good’ state, and the corrigibility of borders (Leets Hansen and Suárez-Krabbe 2019). This is where I am writing from; yet my arguments both draw on and I believe are relevant for research on border violence across Europe’s varied geographies. Indeed, my main interest in this article is the European societies profiting from and engaging in border violence, and (hopefully) without collapsing them into universal or monolithic entities (see Stoler 1989), I will interrogate the role of this violence in sustaining them – not only materially, but also affectively.¹

The article is structured in three parts. The first part explains what I mean by Europe’s borders and offers a brief overview of how critical interventions in border studies have enabled violence to be named and challenged, and crucially contributed to epistemic struggles within academia. However, precisely because of these contributions, I maintain that it is important to ask how research that centres the violence of borders might also unwilfully contribute to it. I elaborate on this argument in the two subsequent sections of the article. In the second part, I draw on Black feminist and decolonial critique of ‘damage-centered research’, defined by Tuck and Yang (2014) as research that operates ‘within a theory of change in which harm must be recorded or proven in order to convince an outside adjudicator that reparations are deserved’ (227) and which consequently must assume that those violated ‘are broken’. I argue that when research on border violence operates within this framework, it may unintentionally contribute to reifying abyssal line between those ostensibly protected by whiteness and citizenship, and the ‘Others’ exposed to border violence. The third section builds on Hagar Kotef’s (2019, 2020) theorisation of violent attachments, and asks, provided the central function that border violence serves in sustaining what has been called ‘the European way of life’ (see, for instance, von der Leyen cited in Tidey 2019), how far visibilisation of border violence – a central strategy in critical border studies and activist work – will contribute to ending it. The concluding section discusses the need to reflect on the implication of knowledge production in sustaining violent arrangements, and to place limits on damage-centred research and make way for political imaginaries and life-affirming practices beyond violent borders.

Borders of a Violent Europe

‘Europe is indefensible’, declared Aimé Césaire (2000 (1950), 32; emphasis in original) in Discourse on Colonialism. To Césaire, the inability of Europe to reconcile its liberal self-image with the violence of colonisation, enslavement, and genocide – and to recognise how the two are constitutive of one another – was a testament to the demise of Europe’s ‘civilisation’. Accordingly, the dehumanisation necessary to sustain Europe’s colonial project would eventually result the self-destruction of empire. Some seventy years after Césaire’s intervention, European politics continue to be ridden by violence and dehumanisation, manifesting (among other places) in the enforcement of its ever-expanding borderlands. Europe’s borders are mechanisms of differentiation, which produce, sustain, and normalise unequal access to rights, mobility, and freedom along the lines of race, class, and gender. As such, they are infrastructures of global apartheid (Balibar 2004, Besteman 2020) that reproduce the abyssal line between the colonised and the coloniser wherever they are found and expose people who challenge them to premature death (Gilmore 2007, Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou 2015). According to this understanding of borders, propagated by Marxist, postcolonial, and critical border studies, violence should not be considered an aberration but systemic and foundational to the European border regime.

Indeed, a significant body of literature generated by activists and researchers has demonstrated how violence – legal, symbolic, and bureaucratic (Bhatia 2020, Sajjad 2022), direct, brutal, and extralegal (Border Violence Monitoring Network 2020; Statewatch 2020), structural and indirect (Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017; Mayblin et al. 2019; Author 2020) – is ‘routinely’ used by European states to control racialised mobilities (Isakjee et al. 2020, 1). Border violence not only inflicts physical harm but operates epistemically and existentially, by ‘turn(ing) life into objects’, erasing empathy for the suffering (Segato 2016, cited in Aradau and Canzutti 2022, 2). Efforts to document these harms have included and built upon the struggles of those whose mobility has been illegalised (from the Sans-Papiers movement and the Gilets Noirs in France, to Castaway Souls of Denmark, Lampedusa in Hamburg, No border movements in Greece, and movements to end immigration detention in the UK, to name just a few), who have insisted on the coloniality of the structures of violence and dehumanisation they are exposed to. Evidently, these efforts to document border-induced harms have been and remain important elements of struggles against borders. Naming borders as violent and providing forensic evidence of violations does important political work, as it challenges the invisibilisation and normalisation of harm, demands accountability from states and their corporate allies, and may contribute to pressuring them to change their practices and thereby enhancing the life prospects of individual border crossers.

Moreover, to understand its politics and operation, researchers have explored what makes some forms of border violence – notably that which is slow, indirect, and systemic – go unrecognised (by politicians, activists, and researchers; see Davies 2022), why violence is understood and studied differently across different geographies (Namberger et al. 2021) and of course, depending on whom it targets (Lindberg, 2022), and what functions violence has in different sites and contexts (Tyner and Inwood 2014).² Researchers working with post- and decolonial approaches and with theories of racial capitalism have examined the productive role of border violence in sustaining ‘Europe’ as an ideological (modern/colonial; Quijano 2000) and material project (De Genova 2002, Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou 2015, Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018, Khosravi 2019). By foregrounding issues of race and racism (Isakjee et al. 2020), they have shown how human rights frameworks, with their promise of universal rights protections, function as technologies of a ‘“differential rights order”, which serve to normalise the devaluation of negatively racialised bodies and their labor power (…) through assignments of racialised and gendered rightlessness’ (Melamed and Reddy, 2019, 3^rd paragraph). In this view, European states’ formal commitment not to harm, kill, or maim people on the move (see Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017) is not a guarantor against violence but serves to sustain the colonially rooted imaginary of Europe as a civil and civilising actor, while keeping relations of domination and inequality intact (Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou 2015, Lowe 2015). Indeed, border violence is routinely enacted in the name of upholding ideals of liberalism and human rights.

In naming these attachments between European modernity and racial violence, critical research on border violence is also doing important work to challenge the ‘epistemic borderwork’ (Davies et al. 2023) undertaken by states to invalidate, delegitimise and criminalise the dissenting voices of people and organisations who bear witness to border violence, and who articulate the racial order that makes violence acceptable (ibid.; see also Arce and Suárez-Krabbe 2019). Such borderwork is also undertaken through mainstream academic knowledge production: by centring the coloniality of borders and their role in sustaining racial capitalism in their analysis, critical border scholars challenge the silence and denial of these interlocking structures that prevails in much of European social scientific research. As a result, these scholars – especially those analysing racism and racial capitalism and drawing on decolonial and feminist theory – are routinely dismissed in mainstream academia as ‘activist’, ‘biased’, and hence illegitimate (see Kalir and Cantat 2020, Meret 2021, Mulinari and Neergaard 2023, Thapar-Björkert and Farahani 2019). At the same time, and precisely because research naming border violence does such important political work – for the epistemic struggles over knowledge production in academia, and in the public sphere – it is important to take seriously its performative effects. In the following sections, I address two issues associated with damage-centred research, which should be of concern for scholars researching borders and their inherent violence. I first address the critique of representations of victimhood, and the risk of such representations reifying rather than challenging racial hierarchies. I then turn to a question that remains unaddressed in much border-related research: namely, that if violence against people on the move (and citizens experiencing racial inequality) is indeed integral to the borders of ‘Europe’ – as indefensible now as they were seventy years ago – then exposure of border harms may not necessarily lead to change but risk reaffirming the structures that inflict harm.

Violent Representations

How does one come to terms with a brutal imagination by engaging and representing (over and over again) the materialization of that imagination?

(Sharpe 2022, 31)

In their reflection on the function of public memorials and monuments of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, and their differential effect on those whose ancestors were oppressed and those who oppressed them, Christina Sharpe (2022) raises the question of what political and affective work violent representations do, and for whom. For those with a history of being harmed, material manifestations of past brutalities fall short of offering repair; for those whose ancestors perpetrated or profited from harm, the same manifestations run the risk of freezing the commemorated events in the past, while freeing the present from responsibility for the brutalities committed in the aftermath of colonialism and slavery. Sharpe also underlines that public displays of past suffering risk reproducing, even fetischising, the brutal imaginations they seek to address – of white supremacy, and the violability of Black and brown bodies.

Concerns over how representations of violence impact various audiences have also been raised in the context of social scientific research. Indigenous, decolonial, and Black feminist theorists have problematised the ways in which ‘damage-centered’ research contributes to the thingification of the subaltern (Césaire 2000 (1950), Smith 1999, Spivak 1988, Tuck and Yang, 2014), extracting stories of their death and suffering while ignoring their world-making practices (Hooks 1990; Smith 1999; see also McKittrick, 2022). As Christina Sharpe (2022) contends, a gaze on the subaltern that focuses on what is wounded reduces the person to a spectacle of violence; a spectacle that the researcher claims ‘the right to capture, to capture what is deemed abjection, and the right to publish it’ (248–9). Such spectacle ‘is a relation of power’, where the human is effectively eradicated. Therefore, representations of ‘others in pain’ may, even when the intent is to challenge violence and lend legitimacy to the voices of those who have been harmed, end up silencing the very same ‘voices’ they claim to represent.

Such critique of research that centres on but does not engage with its ‘suffering subjects’ (Robbins 2013) has also been raised in the context of border and migration research (Bejarano et al. 2019, Rozakou 2019). In addition to criticism of the commodification of suffering within the research industry (Andersson 2016, Cabot 2019, Golash-Boza, Duenas, and Xiong 2019, Newhouse 2018), concerns have been raised that border-related research reproduce the border crosser as an exceptional figure, external to and inherently different from the imagined majority society (Rajaram 2018, Ramsay 2020). Cabot (2016, 467) notes how the ‘space carved out’ for the marginalised (the border crosser, the illegalised person, the refugee status holder) in damage-focused research renders people crossing borders recognisable only within the narrow parameters of vulnerable victims. The frames of intelligibility determining victimhood are structured by race, class, and gender, and it operates by spatially and temporally containing those who have suffered harm in a developmental hierarchy of ‘victimry and subalternity’ (Landau, 2019, Tuck and Yang, 2014). This hierarchisation can be traced to the logics of liberal humanitarianism, which inserts the pained body (in this case, the refugee or rescued migrant) into a racial matrix that simultaneously produces the racialised subaltern of rescue, and the white European as an agent of ‘innocent hospitality’ (Piccozza 2021, 13; a critique also voiced by people on the receiving end of this ‘hospitality’ – see Mulinari 2021). Therefore, when academic research, journalistic reports, and advocacy reduce people to their pain stories – even when its purpose is to evoke empathy, solidarity, and to undertake advocacy – it risks feeding into dehumanising narratives where the ‘migrant/refugee/illegalised person’ is granted space only as a figure of suffering, but deprived of any other human qualities, including humour (Franck 2022), rage (Hooks 1990) and defiance (Arce and Suárez-Krabbe 2019, Mulinari 2021).

To Tuck and Yang (2014), the risk of decontextualised pain narratives is that they reproduce rather than undo dehumanisation, as they seem to suggest an unbridgeable difference between those targeted by border harms and those unmarked by violence. Indeed, these narratives reify the gap between ‘self/other’: between those who are protected (and supposedly protecting) and those who have been violated. Meanwhile, they hide the historical and political structures and processes of domination causing this divide. Reflecting on pain-centred narratives and what they do to ‘the other’ in pain, Tuck and Yang (2014, 231) write,

Logics of pain focus on events, sometimes hiding structure, always adhering to a teleological trajectory of pain, brokenness, repair, or irreparability—from unbroken, to broken, and then to unbroken again. Logics of pain require time to be organized as linear and rigid, in which the pained body (or community or people) is set back or delayed on some kind of path of humanization, and now must catch up (but never can) to the settler/unpained/abled body (or community or people or society or philosophy or knowledge system) (…) Under a developmental hierarchy, in which some were undeterred by pain and oppression, and others were waylaid by their victimry and subalternity, damage-centered research reifies a settler temporality and helps suppress other understandings of time.

Tuck and Yang argue that depictions of pained bodies invite the subaltern into humanity as latecomers, and only upon the condition that they subscribe to the teleological path towards progress and (individual) repair. The ‘logics of pain’ hold that because they are injured, because they are dehumanised, they are essentially different (other-than and less-than-human) and set back on the path towards liberal modernity. Hence, representations that centre suffering do little to challenge the dehumanisation of those exposed to harm.

This notion of injury as a marker of unbridgeable difference reverberates not only in research but also in public debate on borders and migration. I want to use two brief examples to illustrate this. Writing from the Nordic context, Suárez-Krabbe (2022, 6) reflects on how the COVID-19 pandemic was framed by prominent public figures in Denmark as ‘the first time the Danish people, the “happy children of globalization” (…) encountered fear’. In these representations, the absence of fear and taken-for-granted protection from harm emerges a ‘condition of whiteness in Denmark’, a position of ‘knowing fear always as other peoples’ fear, or as distant and/or impossible to act upon’. This position, Suárez-Krabbe argues,

‘denies all of us “other” Danes who do not fit into (a) “common future” (…) because we have lived – and live – (…) the devastating effects of this global system. Effects that have led us, or our (grand)parents, to flee from our (settler colonial) places to live when they were turned into places to die’.

(ibid., 7)

Suárez-Krabbe suggests that the colonising/oppressing subject, here embodied by the White, Danish/European Man who is untouched by violence, is constituted in contrast to the injured, suffering other, who is denied a place in the community of the present – and in a common future. Suárez-Krabbe shows how this differentiation is productive of national and racial identity, since the harm inflicted upon people with migration history and the discrimination faced by Black and brown people mark them as different from members of the privileged population. This racial politics has material effects: it precludes solidarity based on recognition – of a shared condition of precarity, and of a shared interest in resisting inhumanity (Danewid 2017, Rajaram 2018), as Danishness/Europeanness/Whiteness comes to be perceived as an insurance against the oppression and unfreedom embodied by the suffering other.

However, the matrix of separation is continuously disrupted by the presence of the injured ‘other’. If the tale of liberal modernity rests upon ‘dualistic spatial demarcations of a (peaceful) here and a (violent) there, near and far, global north and south’ (Namberger et al. 2021, 1196), the presence of people harmed by borders ‘here’ (in Europe) challenges the liberal imaginary that locates violence ‘over there’ (in the Global South). Staying with examples from the Nordic region, organiser Nicolas Lunabba shares an observation from his work with youth experiencing racial inequality and structural abandonment in Malmö, Sweden, of how the very fact of their marginality necessitates their dehumanisation. Lunabba (2022) describes how dominant representations of minority-racialised youth render them responsible not only for the violence they are exposed to, but for shattering the imaginary of an essentially benevolent and egalitarian Swedish state and society:

You are a disgrace; you are an anomaly in the most progressive and human rights loving country in the world. People cannot be left to die here so to die, because of your exposure to premature death, you must be made non-human. Only non-humans can die; if we let humans die, it challenges our welfarist self-representation.

What Lunabba’s speech points at is a logic by which exposure to violence and marginalisation becomes a cause of dehumanisation: because you are oppressed, you must be less than human, because oppressed humans are an oxymoron in the Swedish welfare state. His reflection acutely demonstrates the force of dominant representations that disconnect experiences of violence from the structures that caused it. And if violence is the ‘constitutive outside’ of whiteness (Sharpe 2022, 41) – to be untouched by violence is part of what constitutes Europeans, and what constitutes Europeans as white – it follows that ’racial exclusion, violence, and domination produce a sense of membership (…) community, opportunity, futurity, and possibility’ (Beltrán 2020, 19). Returning to the question of the performative effects of damage-centred research, this conclusion suggests that representations of border violence risk reifying hierarchical differentiations between those injured and those untouched by harm. It also raises the uneasy question of how far efforts to render the violence done to (and hence, the violability of) ‘others’ visible will challenge it.

Violent Attachments

‘Colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism’.

(Césaire 2000 (1950), 35)

As Césaire so aptly puts it, colonisation dehumanises the oppressor as well as the oppressed. If representations of border violence risk affirming the dehumanisation of those who are stopped, harmed, and have their lives cut short by borders, what effects do these same representations have on the actors, institutions, and societies directly enforcing and indirectly profiting from border violence? An assumption that underpins much of the work by researchers, organisations, and movements seeking to challenge border violence is that violence is permitted to continue because its lethal effects are obscured and effectively denied by European governments and state authorities. It follows that if only the policymakers, institutional actors, and the public learn about the adverse effects of borders, the ‘broken’ system will be fixed, and its violence called into questioned and ultimately ended. However, if we take seriously the proposition that European borders serve precisely to differentiate and hierarchically order human life along the lines of race, gender, and class (Besteman 2020, Rajaram 2018), then border violence is not a symptom of a broken system, but evidence that the system is working exactly as intended. This raises the question of how far practices of rendering injury and human rights violations visible will contribute to challenging structures that inflict pain.

Undeniably, strategies of hiding, obscuring, and keeping violations invisible play an important role in enabling border violence. The obfuscation of violence is key to preserving ideas of European civility; it ‘enables Europeans, both individually and collectively, to affirm their sense of self at the same time as making invisible the colonial order that provides the context for their “self”-realization’ (Bhambra 2014, 130). It is therefore unsurprising that governments and state authorities devote significant efforts to removing evidence of systemic border violence ‘out of sight and out of mind’ of their publics (Lecadet 2018, Walters 2015). This is done by ensuring that sites of enforcement are well-hidden (in asylum or detention camps located in forests, hinterlands, or islands); externalised and outsourced (e.g. to armies and contractors operating outside the EU, or to ‘natural’ geographies such as oceans, rivers, deserts, and mountains) and by deflecting state responsibility for border deaths (often to facilitators or to the people seeking refuge themselves). Activists, border monitoring groups, humanitarian organisations, and academics have shown that states use orchestrated ignorance, ambiguity, and distortion of the causes of violence to justify border violence (see e.g. Borrelli 2018, Stel, 2021). State secrecy, as shown by Glouftsios (2023), can also take the form of selective disclosure of information and evidence of harm in ways that make the injustice and violence that caused the harm ‘disappear’. Hence, visibility is no guarantee for accountability, and when spectacular manifestations of border violence do emerge, they are portrayed as ‘exceptional’ and external to liberal politics, and not as constitutive of and embedded in ‘the routinized workings of society itself’ (Davies 2022, 413).

Yet, the logic of invisibilisation does not account for the fact that border violence is widely accepted if not actively endorsed by European societies – not only its hidden forms but also the spectacular ones. This indicates the existence of an ‘affirmative relation’ (Kotef, 2019, 20) of European societies to the violent conditions targeting people on the move. To theorise this attachment, and what it might imply for researchers seeking to challenge border violence by making it visible, I draw on the work of Hagar Kotef (2019, 2020), who writes on the historical and ongoing violence of settler colonialism, apartheid – and since October 2023, yet another campaign of genocidal warfare (Segal, 2023) – perpetrated by the Israeli state against the Palestinian people. Settler colonialism is a context where ‘the existence of some – their lives, their bodies, their security, and their prosperity – is conditioned on inflicting violence or insecurity on others’ (2019, 2). ‘There is not an “I”, in the case of the settler’, Kotef contends, ‘without dispossession, if not elimination, of natives, and so the effort to stabilize identity (…) is inextricable from this violence’ (15). The settler self is constituted through the creation of a racialised and dehumanised other, and reaffirmed through the violence that can be done to these others. ‘This injury’, Kotef continues, ‘can be intentional or not, direct, or structural. It can be celebrated by the injuring person, ignored by them, or even hurt their sense of self, but it is nonetheless part of who they are’ (21). Hence, deep attachments are developed to the structures of injury, and it follows that ‘violence is not always in conflict with the self or the community, but something whose very loss may threaten the self’ (13, emphasis in original).

The settler colonial context in which Kotef writes differs in significant ways from the European system of mobility control designed to contain and prevent undesired immigration. However, there are important similarities in the colonial logics and technologies – the objectifying logic of racial differentiation that constitutes the self/other, and the technologies of in/security, which inflict violence, insecurity and death upon others in the name of self-protection – which can be discerned in both contexts as well as in other sites where violence is deployed to uphold capitalism, racial hierarchy, and ethno-nationalism (Besteman 2020, Bhambra 2014, Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). Accordingly, Kotef’s argument can be deployed to trace the broad public acceptance of the harms inflicted on people categorised as refugees, migrants, and minority-racialised people in Europe to the ‘European masses’ material and affective attachment to border violence. Kotef underscores that the political and public desire is not necessarily for violence itself, but for the unequal distribution of rights, freedoms, and privileges that a given system of oppression serves to uphold.

In the case of the European border regime, the material attachments encompass exclusive access to land, resources, and labour power for the citizen populations (see Danewid 2021). The material benefits of this arrangement can be exemplified by European economies’ well-documented dependency on exploitable migrant labour and the latter’s subordinate inclusion in Europe’s ‘raced markets’ (Bhagat 2022, De Genova 2002, Rajaram 2018) and national welfare systems (Coddington, Conlon, and Martin 2020, 1425). Indeed, scholars writing on race and capitalism have demonstrated the centrality of borders as instruments for dividing the working class along the lines of race and origin (Danewid 2021, Mulinari and Neergaard 2022, Rajaram 2018, Sharma 2021, Walia 2021). And while fortified borders by no means address the existential and material precarity of white and citizen workers, they serve to ensure electorates that ‘the wages of whiteness’ (Roediger 2007, see also Beltrán 2020) remain in place. Accordingly, even those relatively marginalised based on class, gender, age, or disability, and even in a world of neoliberal austerity, the white majority population are made to believe they ‘might lose everything but not whiteness’ (ibid., 15).

This indicates an affirmative relation to public representations of violated ‘others’, as it upholds whiteness as inviolable. Affectively, then, borders and the violence they mobilise draw on fear and hatred of the border crosser, while mobilising love, loyalty, and desire for whiteness and its promise of safety for the already privileged (Ahmed 2004, Bissenbakker and Myong 2019). Violence targeting the fearful other then ‘produces (...) a commonsense understanding of community’ (Beltrán 2020, 19). The constitutive ‘other’ of this membership – the migrant worker, the refuge-seeker, or the citizen experiencing racial inequality – are discounted from this community (Ramsay 2020). And when this orchestrated divide of humanity becomes naturalised, it is perfectly possible for members of racially privileged groups to simultaneously advocate for liberal egalitarianism and endorse border policies that inflict violence on the racial other. What does this then mean for research representations of border violence?

Kotef (2020, 30) argues that when affect is successfully mobilised in support of violence, strategies that seek to challenge the violence by making it visible to the public ‘fail to perceive that people can desire the violent arrangements supporting their communities (not merely deny and suppress them or see them as a “necessary evil”) (…) and therefore fail to address political settings in which violence becomes an affirmative element of political identities and is embraced rather than denied’. In such contexts, representations of violence ‘may lose their critical edge’, and unintentionally ‘participate in a celebration of violence’ (ibid., emphasis added). Translated into the context of the European border regime, it means that the evidence produced of the harmful if not lethal consequences of borders might invertedly contribute to their legitimation. And while overt celebrations of border-related harms and deaths might be limited to populist politicians and those who use border violence as a strategy to divert voter attention from social and structural problems towards constructed border threats (Little et al. 2023), tacit tolerance and acceptance of such violations also indicates an affirmative relation to violence that extends to state enforcement apparatuses (see Bhatia 2020, Lindberg 2022) and to broader segments of society (Aradau and Canzutti 2022). This is not to suggest that European societies’ material and affective attachments to violent borders are absolute or eternal; quite on the contrary, they are messy, contested, and continuously changing. Yet I argue that the prevalence of these (messy) attachments to violence call for caution to be taken in the production, circulation, and usage of knowledge that evidences the violence of Europe’s indefensible border regime.

Conclusion: Unease, and the Dirt of Research

In their article on ‘refusals’, Tuck and Yang (2014, 227; see also Simpson 2007) observe that ‘much of the work of the academy is to reproduce stories of oppression’ without questioning the rationale for collecting such stories’. The purpose of this article has been to critically explore the assumptions, rationales, and performative effects of research efforts to evidence border violence in Europe in a time where this violence seems to be widely accepted and endorsed among European societies. The article has departed from my own unease (Stern and Baaz, 2016) with the ways in which critical research on borders – including my own – that describes violence and the suffering it produces unintentionally contributes to the reproduction of a bordered order.

Importantly, I have not sought to argue that evidencing border harms is politically or analytically futile. Quite on the contrary, forensic evidence of border harms remains vital, not only to enhance public accountability for violations but to challenge the epistemic borderwork (Davies et al. 2023) practiced by governments, state authorities, and by mainstream academia, to silence and discredit critical voices as part of their efforts to deny the coloniality and racial violence of Europe’s borders. Hence, the question is not whether such research should be undertaken (I believe it should and must) but rather how, why, and for whom. It is with this aim in mind that I have sought to provide a critical reflection on how damage-centred research (Tuck and Yang, 2014) risks reproducing border harm. The first element of critique has to do with how violent representations impact those exposed to violence: here, I have drawn on the work of Black feminist and decolonial theorists and their important critique of researchers’ obsession with subaltern victimhood, but also explored how representations of ‘others’’ suffering reify imaginaries of racial difference that harden rather than challenge the border between the self/other. The second provocation focuses on the effect that visibilisation of violence is expected to have on those engaging in or profiting from it. Drawing on Hagar Kotef’s (2019, 2020) work on affective attachments to harm, I have argued that border violence is not only permitted to continue because it is ignored or obscured from public view, but because European societies – like other colonial societies premised on racial difference and subordination (Kotef 2019, 2020) – are emotionally and materially invested in borders and the injuries they inflict on others. This brings some uneasy questions regarding the effects research that visibilises harm can be assumed to have on the societies perpetrating it.

Attention to this unease serve as a (painful) reminder that, as argued by Stern and Baaz (2016, 134), ‘however critical we may be of others’ cohesive, universalising framings that sediment subject positions, silence voices, and render people invisible, we too are complicit in reproducing our own (violent) and limiting framings’. I hope to have shown that staying with the unease and indeed, the dirtiness of research (Smith 1999), enable important questions to be raised regarding the performative effects of damage-centred research on Europe’s borders. It might lead to different questions, less occupied with how to fix a system that is not broken but produces harm exactly as intended, and more concerned with what is required to challenge the dehumanisation – of the oppressed, but also and importantly of the oppressor – that borders are premised upon. Attending to this unease also means questioning the violent attachments of academic knowledge production to borders and, following Tuck and Yang (2014), to place limits on its appropriation and exploitation of suffering. Moving beyond documenting the damage produced by oppressive systems is also needed to foreground, learn from, and promote political imaginaries and world-making practices – of love (Hooks 1990), hope (Kaba 2022) and freedom work (Davis et al. 2022) – that prefigure life beyond nation state borders.

Afterall, the borders of global apartheid cannot be the answer to the problems they serve to sustain. In her Letters to Science, McKittrick (2022, 23) argues that ‘liberation cannot, in any way, be a formulated answer to how we resolve the troubling awful world we inhabit if it is posed as a subsequent counterreaction to that troubling awful world – for that end-answer all too often demands a beginning-question framed within the perimeters of, and thus invested in the systemic replication of, our awful world’. Therefore, ‘radical theory-making’ – theories capable of imagining new ways of being and doing – can only take place outside dominant knowledge systems, and by those ‘intimately aware of both the limits of the current knowledge system and of the dysfunction of the current way of being’. No Border movements and abolitionists have long argued that nation-state and imperial borders necessitate violence and therefore cannot be part of the solution for any political project that strives to liberates societies from harm. They have also shown how borders pave the way for a generalised dismantling of rights, welfare, and solidarity within the societies that believe themselves to be protected by such violence. Borders are neither necessary nor defensible, but a testament to the ‘dysfunction of the current way of being’. Undoing them, and detaching our ‘selves’ from their injurious structures, is ultimately in the interest of all.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the editors and fellow contributors of the special issue on ‘Safe Havens’ for the all the fruitful discussions and for their critical engagement with the text at its different stages. Special thanks to Thom Davies and Kari-Anne Drangsland, who provided in-depth comments on the text, and to the friends and colleagues whose critical and constructive comments have helped me develop its argument: Joe Anderson, Karen da Costa, Anja Karlsson Franck, Jessie Jern, Alexander Jung, Lotte Pelckmans, and Amin Parsa. Finally, to the anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and in-depth engagement with the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Of course, ‘Europe’ is far from unitary actor and the relation and implication of its different peoples and geographies to border violence vary significantly. Notably, relations of domination and oppression and racism also exist among European states and societies. In this text, I refer to ‘Europe’ as part of the ideological and material project of ‘the West’ as colonising and civilising power, historically constituted in relation to the subaltern, colonised ‘other’ (see Finotelli 2009, Grosfoguel 2012).

2. These questions have allowed researchers to move beyond the purported ‘paradoxes’ that characterise mainstream knowledge production on borders and migration: border regimes fail to prevent undesired mobility despite their continuous fortification, and that European states which commit to humanitarian values systematically harms border-crossers (see e.g. Bauböck and Ruhs 2022, Leerkes and Houte, 2020).